Iannone "not expecting a lot" on Aprilia debut

Andrea Iannone admits he is “not expecting a lot” from his first race with the Aprilia MotoGP squad in the 2019 season opener in Qatar.

Iannone sat out much of the first pre-season test in Sepang and then finished 18th overall – four places behind teammate Aleix Espargaro - over three days of running at Qatar's Losail International Circuit.

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“The positive for sure is I have a good feeling on the braking point and the first part of the [corner] entry,” he added.

“For sure we need to improve a little bit the turning of the bike, in any case we try to improve during this year this situation.

“I know it’s really difficult to improve during one test or one race weekend but in any case it’s our target.”

Both Aprilia bikes finished out of the points in Qatar last year, although Espargaro was fighting for the top 10 when his RS-GP developed a fuel issue.

The Spaniard is happier with the 2019 specification of the bike, but admits he was “expecting to be a little bit faster” in his race simulation at Losail.

“I did 22 laps. I expected to be better, we found some problems, but this is why we are testing, to learn, and this is why it was so important to do a race simulation, because now the engineers have a lot of information to improve the bike for the first race here in two weeks’ time.

“It would be nice to have some more days to test, it’s quite short, but it’s the same for everybody.

“The 2019 RS-GP is clearly better than the ’18 one, but [I'm] not sure it is ready to fight for the top 10 in every single race. Let’s try, let’s see how close or how far we are.”